


A Day at a Time

by JazzRaft



Series: daemon / hunter [3]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2017-02-20
Packaged: 2018-09-25 22:30:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9849290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: Ravus wakes in the middle of the night searching for solitude. He doesn't expect to find a safe harbor instead.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [tumblr](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/156538922152/if-you-arent-overwhelmed-by-other-promts-would) for an anonymous request.

“Well, this is a first.”

Ravus froze upon being greeted by the deep chuckle. He’d failed to notice Gladiolus’s absence from the tent before he climbed out into the night himself, assuming the man to be just as dead to the world as the rest of his companions.

“What are you doing awake at this hour?”

“Answering that’s gonna cost you an answer of your own.”

Gladiolus’s grin glinted wolf-like in the moonlight, and Ravus bristled like a cornered wildcat. He regarded the man suspiciously, stepping around the chair he reclined in as if it were surrounded by land mines.

“Tell you what: I’ll go first as an act of good faith,” the swordsman offered. “Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night for a guard shift. I know this” – he gestured at the protective runes carved into the haven – “are supposed to do the guarding for us, but I just can’t seem to shake the habit of keeping a look-out myself. Call me paranoid.”

He laughed at himself, shoulders rolling. When Gladiolus laughed, his whole body laughed with him. Subtle motions that gave him a perfect, under-stated animation; a warmth that Ravus found… comforting, the more days he spent in his company. There was something very safe about Gladio, and it wasn’t only attributed to his upbringing or his intimidating physique. He was a sanctuary more than he was a shield, and maybe that was why the answer coaxed its way past Ravus’s lips.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

Ravus doubted it was the elaborate explanation Gladiolus might have been hoping for, but he hadn’t asked for specifics. He’d merely asked for an answer. And while he hadn’t asked for a truthful one, Ravus gave it to him anyway – it would have been futile to lie to him, Ravus had learned that very early on.

Gladiolus shifted in his seat, resting his elbows on his knees as he leaned forward. Ravus turned his back to him, catching the inquisition in his eyes. If he thought avoiding the look would make it any less intense, Ravus had wrongly estimated the power behind it. He could feel the man’s stare heating at the back of his neck, unobtrusive, but also unrelenting.

“Bad dream?” he asked, slowly.

“Somewhat.”

An incomplete truth again. But then, Gladio wasn’t asking for whole ones. Ravus was as honest as he could be within the extent of the swordsman’s questions. Gladiolus wasn’t nosy, but questions were an unspoken clause in his service. He protected Noctis from mortal harm, and also, sometimes, unseen injury. Whether it was within his power to fix or not, he felt obligated to ask, and when he did, his questions were often answers themselves. He always seemed to know the problem, whether he was told or not.

“You want to talk about it.”

It wasn’t a question. Ravus crossed his arms over his chest, a reflexive, defensive gesture that he wasn’t wholly certain he meant to do. If it was meant to dissuade Gladio from pressing the subject, it failed. Miserably.

“You’re not the only one with nightmares around here.”

He was trying to give him something to relate to, trying to assure him that he wasn’t alone with his personal horrors. That was something he had denied back home, when Luna had tried to offer him the same. He hadn’t confided in his sister because she had far too many burdens of her own that she was struggling to carry. It would be loathsome of him to add to that weight.

So, he’d kept the nightmares to himself. Since his mother died. They’d never stopped since that day. Waking up in cold sweats well past midnight had simply become part of the routine over the years. Sometimes it was still Sylva that haunted him, her blood filling his mouth and her voice screaming at him that he should have saved her. Other times it was Luna. On rare occasions it was Noctis, red-eyed and destroying everything Ravus had upheld himself to protect. Of late, it was Ardyn.

“Hey, I get that you’re not much of a talker.” Ravus tensed at the proximity of his voice, right at his back. It bothered him that he didn’t hear him move. “It doesn’t have to be a lot, but talking about it, even just a little bit, is gonna help in the long run.”

“I fail to see how ‘talking about it’ will be of any benefit.”

“I bet you told yourself something like that before you came on over to our side. But it’s been nothing short of beneficial for you, right?”

Ravus turned around, wielding a glare that met a wall of amber and tenacity. Gladio’s gaze was patient and inviting, and there was a strange tug deep within Ravus that wanted to step through the door he was holding open for him. Regardless of how illogical Ravus felt his solution was. Exposing the dark secret places inside of him was revealing a vulnerability. And Ravus had ceased allowing himself to be vulnerable the day Niflheim attacked.

“I dunno what it’s like over in the Empire,” Gladiolus said. “But out here, we’re brothers. Once you claimed a seat in that car, you became one of us.”

Ravus glanced at the sleek frame of the Regalia parked in the distance, an inky shadow in the moonlight. He glanced at the tent, half-afraid to find three other pairs of eyes peering through the flap at him. And then he glanced back at Gladio, searching his impenetrable stare. He had no trouble understanding the silent implication.

“It stays between you and me,” he promised, softly and with an encouraging nod.

Just as Ravus thought he might concede, all of the words he would have used to describe the nightmares dried up on his tongue. He opened his mouth and closed it again, his eyes falling just below Gladio’s own, searching for a way to force the words out.

“There’s… a lot,” he said. His first confession.

“Start with one.”

“…I left Luna.” _And I left her with **him**._

Gladiolus nodded again and waited, silent as the night. That silence opened wider and wider, Ravus struggling with the fear that had been plaguing him ever since he’d abandoned the Empire. It scared him more than death, and it scared him to say it aloud, as if shaping it with words would somehow make it real. As if saying it would unleash it unto the world and one day make it true.

“I dream of the chancellor corrupting her, as he did me.”

The place where his Magitek arm met his flesh felt cold, a bleeding feeling that spread across every inch of his skin. He felt the dark, twisted thing deep inside of him that had been delighted to do the chancellor’s bidding writhe with this truth. He’d never acknowledged it before, for the same reason that he feared doing so would give it more power.

Ardyn whispered sinful truths into the ears of all who were too weak not to listen, and there was a black magic to how casually he said them that made one feel it was _right_ to submit to them. Like a needle in his veins, the man had infected him with a lack of morality, enabled him into seducing his baser instincts. Manipulated his honor and mutilated it into something Ravus could no longer recognize.

And he’d left Luna behind. He’d left her without any protection against those devilish wiles. He’d condemned her to darkness and solitude. He’d left her unsafe.

“Of all the people in the world I’d worry about being corruptible, your sister is certainly not one of them.”

Ravus ventured a glance back up at him, desperately searching for an indisputable truth in his words. Maybe Gladiolus saw that; maybe he didn’t. Either way, he continued.

“I’ve never met Lady Luna, but from what I know, she’s a rare breed. The kind of person that sticks to her guns, even if it would be easier not to. She strikes me as someone who’d happily take the hard road if it meant doing what was right, and I bet no creepy clown in a fedora is gonna be able to knock her off that path.”

Deep down, Ravus thought he might have always known that Gladiolus was right. It was just harder to hear over the clamor of his nightmares. Having someone else affirm it for him helped to raise it a little higher above the noise in his head. Give it a little more truth, a little more trust. It didn’t smudge out everything else – those stains were deep and dark and hard to get out – but it… helped? Ravus couldn’t decide. He wasn’t sure he would even know what it felt like to be “helped.”

“One day at a time,” Gladiolus told him, as if he could hear Ravus’s thoughts. “Same time tomorrow night?”

Ravus looked at him, hard, trying to dig deep past his gaze and find what inspired Gladiolus to take such an avid interest in his psychology, but all he found was his brimming confidence. For some reason, he had no trouble seeing through Ravus’s walls, but Ravus couldn’t see through his. There was a challenge in that, he realized. And Gladio’s invitation may have been an opportunity to rise to it.

Ravus told himself that was why he agreed. He would break down Gladiolus’s walls just as vehemently as Gladiolus was trying to break down his. He told himself that, as he volunteered to take up guard duty so that Gladio might sleep. He told himself that it was because he didn’t want to lose a fight as he stared up at the moon.

It wasn’t because that, for the first time in many, long years, Ravus finally felt… safe.


End file.
